Slashdot Mirror
A Dotcom in a Basement?
garyebickford asks: "I recently learned that a company I co-founded a long time ago has degenerated to the point where the present principals have sold off most of the equipment and have moved 'operations' into their houses. Though the founding concept is almost two decades old, they still believe that they'll be able to pull something out of a hat. I'm pretty sure the two remaining true believers haven't been paid for several years, and have been working outside to support themselves. The company hasn't sold anything for years as far as I know, but they have kept it running through an amazing series of trials and tribulations including some of the most amazing legal shenanigans I've ever heard of. The stock was delisted a long time ago and is now valued at about $0.001. Of course, who knows? Maybe it will recover. It's happened before. I'm sure we all know of many others, like snakebit projects that have migrated from company to company, and 'entrepreneurs' who could raise money over and over but never quite get a company going, and of course, really cool technology that just never seemed to come out of development, or was almost done when the money ran out?So Slashdot, fess up - do you have a 'company in a box' downstairs? What kind of earth-shaking, irrelevant or worthless technology is sitting under your stairs? More interestingly, why are you, or they, still committed to the business?"
Who was it? You didn't even post a link for us to ignore!
I'm typing this a second time because the first time the 20-second rule bit me!
Ok, I run a site, have plans for it that could make me some money in the future, but the site was started after the bust and my main reasons for creating it were to learn something new and to replace a site that had decided to charge subscription fees for basic usage... rather annoyingly too...
It costs me $30/month to run it, I think I can deal with that... One of these days I'll call it reasonably complete and actually go looking for customers too... Ah well... I got other sites to write...
On Arrakis: early worm gets the bird. Magister mundi sum!
soylent green... but psst... don't tell the cops. ...Gotta do s.th. about the smell, too.
-- I love the smell of Blue Screens in the morning.
> I'm typing this a second time because the first time the 20-second rule bit me!
... just throw money. :)
Okay, important safety tip...when you get hit by the 20-second rule, do NOT hit the back button. Simply wait as long as you should have, hit reload, and tell it to resend the data - no retyping those long and brilliant posts! Yay.
Please, please, no applause
There are a lot of good ideas that just don't work out. Maybe the right time will come; maybe not. In the meantime, go do something else. Don't get so attached to something that didn't work out that you miss out on new opportunities.
As for your question, I had a design and partial implementation of a multiplayer game ... for BBSes. I started that project in 1993, and by 1996 I realized that there's little point in writing for BBSes anymore. So I moved on to a 3d simulation game ... for OS/2. By 1997 I realized that there's little point in writing for OS/2 anymore. So I moved on to grad school, working on theoretically sound statically typed programming languages. By 1999 I realized that there's little point in implementing theoretically sound statically typed programming languages. So I moved on. I now work at a "dot com". We'll see how that goes. :-)
But I can't tell, it's my pot of gold, buwhahwhauwhuahw.
No, really. My company will provide services that everyone will pay millions of dollars, but I will donate everything to Free Software projects.
I have this great method and apparatus for electronic information dispersal based on distributed best effort store and forward. I am going to make a mint on this.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I have been working on a concept I call the "basement company idea exchange forum" forum wherein people who have been working on concepts can get together and discuss their ideas for what they call "basement company idea exchange forum" forums wherein people who have been working on concepts can get together and discuss their ideas for what they call "basement company idea exchange forum" forums wherein people who have been working on concepts can get together and discuss their ideas for what they call "basement company idea exchange forum" forums ...
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
I keep *my* dot com in the crapper with all of the other dot.boms, thank you very much.
I knew a dude (his daughter was in my high school) who had a little start up with some kind of database software. I have no idea what the innovation was, but they were convinced that they would take the enterprise DB world by storm. (This is where I should note that I can't recall the name of the company.) He had several coders on staff, but when Oracle finished stringing him along and his tech didn't sell to any of the big players, he fired everyone and kept it on the back burner, working on it himself.
Eventually, Oracle bought him & his code (According to his daughter's non-technical understanding, they *needed* his code.) and he signed on as an Oracle VP. Another girl at my highschool had a dad who was a VP at Oracle, and I remembered him & many other VPs getting axed, so I knew that there was some serious churn in the upper ranks. Thus, I was unshocked when Oracle stiffed him for his code (dunno if they got away with it or he sued) and fired him.
Last I heard was before the bubble burst, and he was doing coding for some dot com, and enjoying it.
All this is filtered through several different types of bias (My own included. Had a crush on his daughter.) but I think it's close to the truth. He had some really lean years after he shrank his company, because despite saving up, he went a lot longer without selling his code than he ever expected.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Dotcoms are, like, so 90's!
My wife and I purchased a townhouse from the founder of a local ISP. When he first started the ISP, he started it literally out of the basement of the townhouse. At one time, he had no less than FIFTY phone lines coming into the house to support the ISP. In the basement of the townhouse, there was an enormous switchbox to support all those lines. I believe the guy had his own T-1 line to handle the bandwidth, but I couldn't say for sure.
The real estate agent used this as a selling point, saying that if we ever had the need for 50 phone lines, the townhouse could handle it! We ended up buying the townhouse, but mainly because of the cathedral ceilings. The extra phone hardware was a nice little bonus.
We have since sold the townhouse, so if you are a dot-com wannabee, don't ask me ask me if it's for sale!
------
www.moneybythenumbers.com
Dude, for eqarthquake regulation purposes, there are no basements in California (unless the home is really old).
... I'm working on hover skateboards ... shhh!
Robert Anton Wilson
Can someone post the text? I can't get to the site! Looks like we slashdotted nothing!
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
The link seems to be working for me...
Nothing.
What Williams is saying is quite simple: remove the ability to profit from production of drugs, which includes not only manufacture and R&D but navigating the FDA approval process, then the drugs will not be produced. I quote:
Whether they are not produced because there's no money to be made, or they're not produced because the companies have gone under, the result is that the drugs we will need won't be there.
I have one of these ideas every week! And so I work on it, get disillusioned, and put it on the back burner (which isn't turned on). Sometimes it's actually someone else's idea, and they're the one that gets disillusioned. Just last week I had a random guy contact me about prototyping something, and we discussed specs for a few days, but apparently he got cold feet.
Oh well. A lot of us have the ability to do practically anything. The real key is being able to stick to it once you start. Thomas Edision has that famous quote, which I won't bother quoting because you all know it already.
...
Well, "serious post" as much as any endeavor of this type can be considered serious...
I've worked completely solo to build this website -- basically, it offers online interactive music exercises with a lot of support for teachers.
I brought it online just a week ago... now I'm waiting to work out a few more kinks before I open the doors to floods of subscribers.
Well, I think I'm guaranteed 2 or 3 subscribers... we'll have to see about the "floods". Anyway, I'm hosting it for $30/month, which I mostly paid for by reselling a bit of my bandwidth to an uncle for his website (he sells batteries and UPS systems).
So... thus far the only real cost are my time (and I built it all outside of my normal working hours).
In some ways, this nicest payoff from this sort of project is the emails from appreciative users... but yeah, I'm hoping it'll become a minor revenue stream. Ego boosts only go so far, in the end (as the work gets less fun).
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
There was MidNet. They provided Internet service (or NFSnet service, pardon my commerialism) to the central US. Then, one day, there was some flooding somewhere in Nebraska. The Central US was without Internet access while someone was pumping water out of their basement.
Of course, back then, running an operation like that was almost acceptable!
I have my Tetris clone I wrote in Turbo Pascal, all packaged and ready for shareware release.
...because probably someone already patented it and will sue me if I achieve any measure of success.
:-/
So my current business plan is to patent it myself, and then sue someone else when they actually put in the time to develop a decent implementation.
Three cheers for software patents
Most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use - Mark Twain
I finally realized that the reason behind your backwards treble clef symbol is a desperate attempt at making an "e". Good God, man. I highly recommend you ditch that idea.
:)
Not so terribly OT -- this may provide a clue as to why basement dotcoms don't tend to launch their creators instantly to fame and fortune. When the creator does it all, "all" tends to include some tasks s/he knows nothing about...
I'm a software developer, not a graphic designer (damnit Jim). Hey, I can make sweeping changes to the entire mediocre GUI with a few keystrokes!
If I had a budget of any kind, or if I expected to make enough money to share, I could get someone to help w/ the graphics... but I don't, so I make due for now. At least I know enough to avoid blinking things and clashing colors.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
I set up a socks server on a dedicated linux box I pay $65/mo for (I'm hosting some websites there). I connect to this box via SSH and tunnel port 1080 so I can use all the IMs--AIM, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ. All without The Man being the wiser. (I'm a rogue, re-imaged my work desktop with my own copy of Win2k--I'm one of the few in my office who didn't get the virus today b/c I keep up to date)
Well my wife's co. blocked her AIM and she was mad, so I hooked her up with the same setup. I thought there might be a business here, so I poked around but the people I asked were too afraid of getting fired to try me out even on a free basis. A crappy economy will sure make people jumpy.
I typically get an idea like this, purchase a domain name for $8 from godaddy.com, then move on to something else.
There are some great ideas out there (kozmo.com?) that don't require $100MM of venture capital to get started. Quite the opposite in fact, b/c the business often doesn't support all that damn infrastructure.
slashsearch.org - slashdot search. powered by google.
Great tips for making it look like you've taken over the world before you actually get your big break.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I run my website (murmurs.com) out of the closet in my condo. There are four servers in there (picture here), right next to the kitty litter.
:) I even draw salary to work on it.
Its not a dot-com in the traditional sense of the word (except the domain) as the site is a research project/art project/fun thing that I do. It is profitable however, because of nice grants and donations I've recieved, which is more than most dot-coms can say
So, as for the technology "under the stairs"
1. Dual PIII 733 mhz, 1 gig of RAM, Red Hat 9 - runs the main website and database. Slowly dying. Being replaced by a dual 1.25 ghz G4 (currently my desktop machine).
2. Dual PIII 1ghz, running Windows XP - runs my mail server, streaming media, etc.
3. PIII 733, 256 of RAM, running Windows 2k server, running direct connect hub.
4. PIII 733, 512 of RAM, development server (being phased out)
I have a 1.1 megabit SDSL line running in, with a Netscreen 5XP acting as a router/firewall/VPN endpoint. I use a Vonage as my voice service.
Currently I'm seeking out capital grants to get a G5 for my desktop, to cascade the G4 down as a server, as well as replacing all my battery backup systems and getting a remote power-on system, as well as doing gigabit ethernet upgrades throughout the condo. Of course we have wireless as well.
They're here.
I've periodically lobbied them to open source their software (which is very cool, actually) and develop a business model like MySQL AB. So far no interest.
In the late 1980's the company was on the American Stock Exchange and valued at over $200 million (this was before the dotcom bubble and after I left.)
They acquired the name eXtr@ct fairly recently, when they came out of bankruptcy. Before that they were named AUDRE, Inc. (short for AUtomated Digitizing and REcognition - we wanted something personal, instead of compudatagraphitronics.) IMHO, if a name/logo is an indicator of a business or a predictor of success then eXtr@ct is disaster. Ever wonder about Enron's teetering E? Hmm.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Sorry to burst your bubble like that, but I felt I should point it out before things get too far.
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Ruby Sleeps
I have a hard time believing that any slashdot reader knows two real live girls.